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53 “It’s Like Some Primal, Some Animal Force . . . That Used to Be Us” Animality, Humanity, and Moral Careers in the Buffyverse A N A N Y A M U K H E R J E A Joss Whedon has always distinguished his work through his ability to inject fundamental questions of human existence into the fantasy, science fiction, and horror he creates.1 Such attention to existential questions is, in general, a strength of science fiction and fantasy, but Whedon is producing, in collaboration with others, a particularly rich and extensive body of work that merges genres and straddles formats. The Whedonverses regularly address questions of existence at the turn of the twenty-first century and the delimitation of both the human and the humane (the two do not always overlap). These texts allow readers to ask and answer thorny questions about the nature of being and divisions between orders of being through metaphor, complex characters, and strong story lines. The work of Joss Whedon is laudable, too, for his consistent attention to matters of social inequity, power and its misuses, and the strife caused by intolerance and exploitation. His work has moral implications—moral in the common ethical sense and also moral in the sense that sociologist Erving Goffman might have understood it. This sense of “morality” (see, for example , Goffman 1963) refers to evaluating one’s relationship with society, understanding the goals and limits of that society, and determining what one’s own goals and affiliations should be. It is a matter of finding one’s place in the 1. I presented sections of earlier drafts of this paper at the Popular Culture Association in the South meeting in Louisville, Kentucky (2008), and at SCW4: The Slayage Conference on the Whedonverses, Flagler College, St. Augustine, Florida (June 3–6, 2010). 54 ✴ Buffy the Vampire Slayer world or, as Buffy phrases it at the end of the television series, the business of letting one’s own cookie dough bake (“Chosen” 7.22). In the Buffyverse, questions of gender, sexuality, and human identity are sometimes posed and prodded through images of and associations with nonhuman animals to interrogate what being human means. For example, the show generally deals with questions of race and racism more effectively through metaphor and the use of monster and animal imagery than through the straightforward human narrative. Critics such as Chinua Achebe (1989) have clearly shown how assertions of animality and savagery can host racist or racialized ideas in the work of an author like Joseph Conrad, whose canonical Heart of Darkness is referenced in Season 4’s “Restless” (4.22). Similarly, gender, sexuality, and politics of all kinds are implicated in using animals, animality, or associations with animals metaphorically or in problematizing the line distinguishing the human from the animal/monster. Through the depictions of monsters and monstrous or possessed human characters who display animal characteristics, and through occasional dreams or visions, Buffy is filled with animal imagery, allusions, and associations. The joke, in fact, is often in the dissonance between the monstrous blending of species and the “personalities” these characters present, such as the genial but hideously slimy-antlered Chaos demon for whom Drusilla leaves Spike in “Fool for Love” (5.7). A handful of episodes will serve to closely consider the animality, social identities, and “moral careers”2 (to borrow Goffman’s term) of Angel, Oz, and Willow—three characters who exist somewhere between the human and the not-human. I also consider the complicated more-thanhuman being and purpose of the vampire Slayers, especially as Buffy’s contemporary experience of being a Slayer is examined against the precivilized figure of the First Slayer, who is meant to act on instinct, quasi-animalistically, rather than to analyze and question. Particularly at issue here, two themes are often conveyed in Whedon’s works through the metaphoric use of animal representations. The first concerns a series of juxtaposed dualisms: the wild and the civilized (the animalistic 2. In his book Stigma (1963), Erving Goffman explores how severely stigmatized persons negotiate finding their place in their social worlds and developing a social identity that feels stable and whole to them. Here, the moral career refers to one’s path through life—partly determined through external circumstances and others’ decisions and partly through one’s own choices and work—and the affiliations, priorities, exclusions, and more that make up that identity and map of the social world. [3.142.198.129] Project MUSE (2024-04...

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